CT Radiation Dose Report Promotes Best Image Quality with Least Radiation Dose

Aiming to promote the best medical imaging practices and help ensure the health and safety of the millions of people who undergo computed tomography (CT) scans each year in the United States, a medical association has issued a CT radiation dose-management report. Issued in February 2008, the report recommends standardized ways of reporting doses and educating users on the latest dose reduction technology.

The authors of the report, the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM; College Park, MD, USA), is a professional association of medical physicists and includes both scientists and board-certified health professionals who care for patients.

Targeted at radiologists, medical physicists, and other medical professionals, the report outlines the best ways to measure, manage, and prescribe radiation dosages. It also gives an overview of ways that clinicians can optimize modern CT scanners to get the most out of the costs incurred in buying the technology--reducing to a bare minimum the amount of radiation to which patients are exposed while still allowing them to benefit from the technique's life-saving ability to image inside the human body.

The benefits of CT scans are enormous, and the technology has revolutionized medicine in the last generation because it can provide cross-sectional images deep inside someone's body with unprecedented clarity. These images help clinicians diagnose unseen illnesses and injuries, and they guide treatment for millions of people each year in the United States.

In the last few years, reports in the medical literature and in the popular press have challenged public perceptions of CT scans by raising questions of risk related to the fact that CT scanners use X-rays, which in high doses can damage the DNA inside cells. However, according to Dr. McCollough, the benefits of receiving a medically justified CT scan far outweighs the risk associated with the low levels of radiation used. To put this into perspective, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) considers the risk of absorbed X-rays from CT scans to be very small. Even so, the FDA recommends avoiding unnecessary exposure to radiation during medical procedures, particularly for children. The FDA published a public health notice in 2001, calling for pediatric CT scans to be customized to the specific needs and smaller sizes of children and only administered when appropriate.

While they are not regulatory bodies, the AAPM and allied organizations such as the American College of Radiology (ACR; Restin, VA,USA) play important roles in helping to achieve the FDA's goal of keeping the radiation dose as low as reasonably achievable, consistent with the medical need, by making recommendations and providing accreditation of CT scan facilities. This is crucial because while the FDA is responsible for regulating CT scanning equipment, it does not actually regulate the actual CT scans. Oversight of the use of X-ray technology in the United States is regulated by individual states' laws.

The AAPM is a scientific, educational, and professional nonprofit organization whose mission is to advance the application physics to the diagnosis and treatment of human disease.


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American Association of Physicists in Medicine